Saturday, May 17, 2008

Teaching Little Fingers to Play

Despite my memories of the very tense Sr. Irene Marie (who, probably to everyone's lasting relief, "jumped the wall," as we used to call leaving the convent in the 1960s), I'm immensely enjoying Tricia Tunstall's Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson (S&S). Noting that "there are very few occasions when a child spends an extended period alone with an unrelated adult," Tunstall's observations flicker between her own childhood piano lessons and those she now gives as an adult. There are plenty of parallels for those of us who go mano a mano with child readers, so check it out.

And, fellow survivors--what can you still play? I still have "Lightly Row," "Spinning Wheel" and "The Juggler" in my fingers.

24 comments:

Play by heart, out of those first piano lessons? Just about everything out of the first Leila Fletcher book. http://www.leilafletcher.com/

When I'm sitting in a student recital (my daughter takes voice and the voice recitals are combined with piano and other music students), I know every (painful) note of a lot of the pieces that are played--after maybe 25 years? I rarely remember the names, but oh, do I remember going over and over and over them.

It's been 15 years since I last played, so basically I've gone from playing a really cool Bach fugue and the theme from Beethoven's Seventh to a tiny bit of Scott Joplin's "Solace" and the left hand of "Maple Leaf Rag."

As the youngest of four, I listened to my brother and sisters play through the John Thompson sequence. I couldn't wait to be able to play "Swans on the Lake." And I can still play it! "Spinning Song," too, for that matter.

My boy has just reached Hayden's "Air" in the first John Thompson. He did not find "Song of the Volga Boatmen" as soul stirring as I did...

What troubles me is that I can remember so many of the words from J.T.'s songs. Think of all the great poetry I could have learned instead of "Stately as pri-in-ces swans part the lilies and gliiiiide..."

there was a wigwam song, wasn't there? that was my favorite because it was minor (I think)? I liked the pounding rhythm--and I don't know whether it was prescribed or not, for that song, but I definitely pedalled it up!I have it playing in my head now.

Oh and on a tangent - I finally saw Sunday in the Park last month and loved it. I thought the stage was stunning - my only disappointment was that I didn't "buy" Daniel Evans as George in the first act, though I liked him just fine in the second.

Thank you very much for recommending this book. It is excellent! Even if you've never taken piano lessons, this will remind you of all the piano lessons in literature--it brought to mind Miss Cobb, the piano teacher in the Betsy-Tacy series, and Madeleine L'Engle's first novel The Small Rain.

About Me

I've been the editor in chief of The Horn Book, Inc, since 1996; previously editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books and a children's and young adult librarian. Received my M.A. in library science from the University of Chicago in 1982 and a B.A. from Pitzer College in 1978.